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National Intelligence Council Quasi Peak Oilers?

Such are the times that not even an institution like the National Intelligence Council can side-step the inevitability of a Post-Peak Oil world. The Council is a representative body of analysts from across the American intelligence community. It has just released a report called, Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World (complete pdf format).

The report states: “Non-OPEC liquid hydrocarbon production (of) crude oil, natural gas liquids, and unconventionals such as tar sands will not grow commensurate with demand. Oil and gas production of many traditional energy producers already is declining. Elsewhere in China, India, and Mexico production has flattened. Countries capable of significantly expanding production will dwindle; oil and gas production will be concentrated in unstable areas. As a result of this and other factors, the world will be in the midst of a fundamental energy transition away from oil toward natural gas, coal and other alternatives.”

The report lays out the tendency for continued economic globalization, although with shifting power centers away from the United States, and the continued rise in global population by 1.2 billion which, in turn, will increase the demand for food by 50 percent by 2030. These, and other geo-political shifting tectonic plates are listed without full consideration of the limits and non-sustainability of these pressures, i.e. the likelihood of total collapse with so many points of critical mass in play.

An interesting confirmation of the crisis facing industrial civilization is the timeline put forth by the report. It matches the timeline leading to 2030 as identified recently by the International Energy Agency’s World Energy Outlook and a paper presented at the Third North American Secessionist Convention, Post-Peak Oil and NAmerican Regional Secession. The year 2030 as a likely socio-economic, political and ecological tipping point was identified as long ago as 1974 by the Club of Rome’s first Limits to Growth Report.

It doesn’t seem to matter on which side of the political fence one takes a stand. The writing is on the wall. Loosely translated the writing reads: systemic shakedown imminent. As the Chinese proverb reminds us all: May you live in interesting times.